W- and Z-boson production with a massive bottom-quark pair at the Large Hadron Collider

Understand

We present total and differential cross sections for W b anti-b and Z b anti-b production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider with a center-of-mass energy of 14 TeV, including Next-to-Leading Order (NLO) QCD corrections and full bottom-quark mass effects.

• We also provide numerical results obtained with a center-of-mass energy of 10 TeV.
• We study the scale uncertainty of the total cross sections due to the residual renormalization- and factorization-scale dependence of the truncated perturbative series.
• While in the case of Z b anti-b production the scale uncertainty of the total cross section is reduced by NLO QCD corrections, the W b anti-b production process at NLO in QCD still suffers from large scale uncertainties, in particular in the inclusive case.